Central Air Conditioning: The Debate Heats Up

What do married couples argue about?  Most people would say money, sex, and housework without even thinking twice.  If the couple has kids, they might say the kids, or how to parent them.  For my husband and I, add a fifth issue:  air conditioning.

We renovated our bungalow and added a second floor to it five years ago.  By the time we got around to replacing the central heating system, there wasn't much money left.  We didn't want to tap any further into our home equity loan, so we decided to forgo the central air conditioning, even though we knew it would cost less if we had it done along with all the other work.  We knew that second floors get hotter than ground floors, but our ground floor is always so cool (it's raised and always has cool air circulating underneath the hardwood floors), so how bad could it be?

Bad, apparently.  Very bad.  At least according to Alfie.  The ground floor is as cool as ever, but the heat rising from the ground floor now goes to the second floor, instead of out the roof.  And even though we have a couple of nice, shady white birch trees out front, the afternoon sun shines straight into our bedroom and the kids' bedrooms.  Certainly it was a lot hotter upstairs than I had expected, but I figured we could cope with it since there aren't that many days when the weather is that bad.  He wanted to put central air conditioning in.  I didn't.  Too hot, he said.  Too expensive, I said.  And the fight was on.  Every summer for the past five years, we've argued about whether we ought to get central air conditioning installed. 

Things really came to a head last year when he started working out in the bedroom in the evenings when he came home.  We bought a portable air conditioning unit, and my sister gave us a window unit that she wasn't using, but he wanted to leave both units on the whole day, even if no-one was there.  Waste of money!, I cried.  Exactly -- central air would be so much cheaper to run, he pointed out.  But it would cost so much to install, and why pay all that money when we'd only use it for a couple of weeks per year?, I asked.  Speak for yourself, he retorted.  Back and forth, thrust and parry, with no end in sight. 

The problem is that we come from such different backgrounds.  I come from the Philippines, where almost every day is like a hot summer day in Palo Alto.  Even though I haven't lived in tropical weather for fifteen years, my body has years of practice in coping with heat.  Just give me a glass of iced Diet Coke and an electric fan pointed straight at me, and I can cope.  Alfie, on the other hand, grew up in the gray skies of England, where practically every day is like a wet winter day in Palo Alto.  Like many Englishmen, he rejoiced in the sunny weather when he first came here, but after fifteen years of living in California weather, he says he's done with extreme heat, so he's more willing to spend on the air conditioning than I am.

This year we bought a solar-powered attic fan and installed it on our roof.  It has worked like a charm, drawing the rising heat up and out and away from our house.  The difference in temperature between our first and second floor has gone from 8 to 10 degrees on a hot day, to less than 5. Temperatures have definitely cooled, Alfie's and mine included. He wants to turn the air conditioning on less often, and I never argue when he does.  He's stopped trying to convince me that we need central air conditioning -- and perversely, I've started thinking that if he wants it that bad, we could probably afford it at this point.  Those units are pretty noisy and ugly, and they are less efficient.  Hmmm... so maybe it is a fight about money, after all.

Original SV Moms post.  Bonggamom writes mostly mushy stuff about her beloved Alfie on her personal blog, Finding Bonggamom.  She saves her Men Are Pigs rants for twitter, girls' nights out and now, the SV Moms Blog.